All Hail the Conquering Hero! – Chapter 7, Prologue 18

And K’ip has survived his first hostile encounter! Which, inevitably, happened immediately after I had mentioned the theoretical possibility of K’ip and Si’ri not encountering any monsters on their way to the amulet – saying something like that always immediately triggers an adverse reaction by fate, at least in a fictional setting. I knew that, of course, since I know those kinds of rules nearly as well as my characters do. >_> Erm.

And K’ip has not only survived, he has succeeded! He has won! Sweet, sweet victory! Complete validation!…He’s probably feeling some sugar rush right now, since no victory in an RPG is as sweet as the first one (with even the final one only coming a close second). This is not at all proportional to the typical difficulty of such a first fight, of course, since the mechanisms of RPGs require that first encounter to be on the very easy side, in order to be manageable for completely inexperienced character(s).

So, a single kobold is an appropriate choice for a first encounter for a single-person-party…but since K’ip is, basically, a little blue kitten on top of being a Level 1 character, I slapped a couple of status ailments on the kobold, to make sure he wouldn’t be too much to handle…well, all of the status ailments, in fact. That it still took K’ip half an hour to win doesn’t bode very well, I’d say… but, naturally, that should get better with a bit of experience.

I’m not keeping close track, but going into this fight he should have had about -10 exp. He started out with 0 after receiving his quest from the Elder – because at the very moment you officially become an adventurer, all of the experience from your former civilian life gets voided. And then he suffered a small exp penalty for his unsuccessful attempt at hiding from Si’ri. But, hey, he’ll definitely gain some exp for his victory here, and there’s lots more out there to be gained – so can the pessimism*, Si’ri! K’ip could turn into a highly competent, veteran adventurer in no time.

More on Mon…uh, Thursday.

* You can put that can next to the one with K’ip’s skeptical look from earlier.

EDIT: corrected ‘goblin’ to ‘kobold’. Sometimes I should really read my own comic before commenting on it. >_>